[4] Largely cleared of forests, Clarendon is a predominantly agricultural municipality, with an elevation of 167 meters (548 ft) above sea level.

[4] Settlement did not occur until 1825 when James Prendergast, a retired British Army Officer, was commissioned by the government to lead this task.

But Prendergast, originally from religiously-divided Ireland, stipulated that settlers only be Protestants in order to avoid similar religious strife.

As a result, Clarendon (and Shawville) is known as the heartland of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism in western Quebec.

[6] From then on and into the 1840s, when the timber industry started to prosper, a second wave of settlement occurred, doubling the population of Clarendon between 1840 and 1850.